Saturday, August 15, 2015

Next Time Government Gives You Dietary Advice, Consider Doing the Opposite

Pointing out the always-changing guidelines of salubrious living is a long-running joke in America. It's worth remembering, though, that any self-corrections we make,  and we make them all the time in real life using common sense, are far more difficult when government puts its imprimatur on pseudoscience, which it also does all the time.

In the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, the federal government's advice manual for citizens, we are warned that "not eating breakfast has been associated with excess body weight." But when researchers from Columbia University decided to test this notion, they found nothing of the sort: "In overweight individuals, skipping breakfast daily for 4 weeks leads to a reduction in body weight," the study's authors note. Other researchers did the same and came to similar conclusions. How many parents and overweight Americans took this advice as gospel when they could have been losing weight by skipping buttermilk pancake breakfasts?

We already know that government recommendations regarding health are often driven by a bunch of Chicken Littles. The leading organ of American scaremongering, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has gotten so much wrong over the years. There was the outrageous contention that 400,000 Americans were dropping dead from obesity every year. (They weren't.) And then there were all the over-the-top warnings about the alleged risks of secondhand smoke. (They don't really exist.)

http://reason.com/archives/2015/08/14/government-health-tips

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